Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  Like the carnival, the circus was a place of ritualized licence, where rules went, briefly, into abeyance. The arena was a place of parrhesia, of speech without brakes, where the plebeians and the people could let off steam. There they could think and say things not permissible in the more ordered world outside. The moralists of the ancient world who saw what happened to fans in the arena used a language almost identical to the outraged commentators of our own day. Dio Chrysostum, in the second century, wrote of fans: ‘… they completely forget themselves, and without shame say and do the first thing that comes into their heads. It’s as if they were under the effect of some exciting substance. They’re unable to follow the game in a civil manner.’

  The architecture of the arena – so similar to the stadiums of today – encouraged that contrast with the urbane, civilized world of the city as people abandoned their usual composure. As Elias Canetti wrote in his book on crowds:

  Outside, facing the city, the arena displays a lifeless wall; inside is a wall of people. The spectators turn their backs to the city. They have been lifted out of its structure of walls and streets and, for the duration of their time in the arena, they do not care about anything which happens there; they have left behind all their associations, rules and habits. Their remaining together in large numbers for a stated period of time is secure and their excitement has been promised them. But only under one definite condition: the discharge must take place inside the arena.

  Violence was associated with these sporting contests long before the twentieth century. Football itself proved such an incendiary sport that, in 1580, the Governor of Bologna banned it in order to ‘avoid fights, scandals and enmities’. The order was widely ignored, so another followed a year later, addressed to ‘dishonest youths and boys, who with little respect and regard damage, ruin and break…’

  Very often the violence was between rival suburbs or villages. Italy is a notoriously heterogenous country, fractured by wars between Barons, Dukes, Doges, Emperors and Popes as they fought for control of territory, tax revenue and obeisance. Emblematic of that incessant fighting was the Battle of Zappolino in 1325. It isn’t remembered for the loss of over 3,000 lives but for the fact that, during the conflict between troops from Modena and Bologna, the Modenesi stole a wooden bucket from a well. Thanks to Alessandro Tassoni’s famous poem, ‘La Secchia Rapita’, the fight is now simply known as ‘the Battle of the Stolen Bucket’. Its theft was a symbol of disdain for the enemy; its retention a mark of martial prowess and civic pride. That hatred between neighbours meant that, once football was formalized as a sport in Italy in the late nineteenth century, it offered, in the words of Gianni Brera, ‘magnificent pretexts for recurrent, collective feuds’ between certain cities and towns. The symbolism of that bucket would be replaced by the ultras’ herald, which bore the name of the group and was flaunted and fought over.

  That formalization of football began in the early 1890s, when an English maritime doctor, James Spensley, introduced ‘Association Football’ to Italy. Since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, English crews had begun to dock in Genova on their way to and from India. Often, they only found time for informal kick-arounds on the hardstanding around Genova’s port. But if they stayed longer, Spensley would take them up by the prison to play on the wet grass. In 1893, Spensley and various British consular officials formally constituted the Genoa Cricket and Football Club in an office in Via Palestro. On almost every scarf, shirt, sticker and website connected to Genoa (the club retains the English spelling) that iconic date is present.

  As a city, Genova is famous for many things, including the green pesto of pine nuts and basil (‘pesto’ just means ground or crushed) and for the oily focaccia ligure. The mispronunciation of the city’s name (or maybe the city’s name in dialect, ‘Zena’) also gave the world the word ‘jeans’. But the city was most renowned, at the turn of the last century, for its football team. It was, by some way, the most successful club in Italy. It won nine scudetti (‘little shields’), although the first championship in 1898 only lasted a day and featured just four teams. Doctor Spensley played in six of the scudetto-winning sides. The last time Genoa won a scudetto was almost a century ago, in 1924.

  Some imagined that this English import would prove a civilizing influence, teaching a violent society how to compete peacefully according to rules and laws. But it didn’t work out that way, either in England or abroad. Rather than sport replacing warfare, it often became an excuse for conflict, especially in Italy where the word for fan – tifoso – was coined because many over-excitable supporters were in such a sweat that they appeared to have typhoid fever.

  There were many riots and fights because of the game, including infamous pitched battles in 1902 between Genoa and Andrea Doria (one half of the future Sampdoria) and in 1905 between Juventus and Genoa. In 1912, police had to save a referee from being stoned in a game between Andrea Doria and Inter. And in 1914, stones and revolvers were used in a match between Livorno and Pisa.

  The first death in a game of Italian football occurred when a Viareggio fan was doubling as a linesman in 1920. Viareggio, a Tuscan coastal town, was playing its local rival, Lucca, and when the crowd became unruly, a Carabiniere (a member of the national militarized police) pulled out his gun and accidentally shot the linesman, Augusto Morganti. Three days of rioting ensued.

  From 1920 until 1922, when the country appeared to be on the brink of revolution and chaos, rampaging fascist gangs called Squadre d’Azione (‘Action Squads’) were fighting workers, socialists and unionists. Their leader was a demagogic former journalist and war veteran called Benito Mussolini. The ranks of these squads were swelled by disaffected veterans from the First World War, who felt betrayed both by the Treaty of Versailles and by the scorn allegedly shown for their military valour. Many of the so-called squadristi were Arditi (‘the bold’ or ‘the daring’) – an elastic term that had stretched from a specific infantry regiment, founded in 1917 during the First World War, to include those men who in 1919 had occupied Fiume under the leadership of Gabriele D’Annunzio as a protest against the handing over of the city (in present-day Croatia) to the new state of Yugoslavia.

  Youthfulness was a central characteristic of these gangs. They adopted a student song from Turin, which had been taken up by the Alpine troops, called Giovinezza (‘Youthfulness’). In this, as in so much else, the black-shirted squads were eerily similar to the future ultra gangs. They had deliberately unsettling sobriquets – ‘the Desperate’, ‘the Dauntless’ – and carried macabre banners, often with a skull-and-cross-bones. There was a ludic element, too, revelling in stealing the symbols of their rivals, which they called stracci or ‘rags’. The signboard of the socialist newspaper, Avanti!, was taken to Benito Mussolini’s offices in Milan as a trophy. Very often, too, the squadristi were recreational drug users. Cocaine had become commonplace during the occupation of Fiume and was now fuel for aggression against the left. In Ferrara, the gang was called Celibano simply because it was the Italianization of the ‘cherry brandy’ they gulped before they went into action. Each squad had a boss called – using the Ethiopian term for a warlord – a ras. Many ultras (deliberately or by chance) now split the word ‘ultras’ in two on their banners, placing a symbol in the middle so as to make ‘ras’ a separate word, as if it were a nod to their ancestry.

  Just as with the ultras fifty years later, the squadristi seemed to be recreating the factionalisms of the past. In his book, Fascist Voices, the late historian Christopher Duggan quotes an eighteen-year-old’s shock at the bloodthirstiness of the spring of 1921: ‘… one act of vendetta follows another… people are pitted against each other as if the malign spirit of the Middle Ages had restored the old feelings of the Blacks and Whites [the two factions of the Guelphs that tore Florence apart in the time of Dante]. It’s just the same now as it was then – only the colours of the parties have changed; but the ferocity is the same and an air of hatred swirls around our heads as if it were the very br
eath of life.’

  The violence of the ultras was never on a par with that of the fascist squads (288 people were killed in public disorder in 1920 alone, only four of whom were fascists), but the symbolism was often identical: Mussolini wanted his black-shirted insurgency to appear like a ‘war of religion’, with its own liturgy and martyrs that would oblige Italians to recognize – as they hadn’t, he felt, after the war – ‘the holiness of the sacrifice of our dead’. There was a perverse religiosity to squadrismo, because the bloodshed sanctified the cause and made recanting akin to blasphemy. Faith was constantly invoked in fascist circles, partly because it papered over the cracks of ideological vacuity, but also because it enabled fascism, in Duggan’s words, ‘to map much of its value system onto the familiar landscape of Roman Catholicism’.

  A few years later, after Mussolini had taken power, there was barely a match that wasn’t accompanied by fights. In July 1925, shots were fired between fans of Bologna and Genoa who had encountered each other at Turin’s Porta Nuova station. What’s remarkable about the subsequent statement from the FIGC (the governing body of Italian football) is how the language used to describe the fans back then is almost identical to how it still labels ultras and their deeds: ‘… this deplorable streak which threatens to disrupt irredeemably the very life of football…’ In the 1930s, Italy twice won the World Cup and the popularity of the sport, with all the surrounding passion and political exploitation, reached new heights.

  Present Day: Cosenza v. Paganese (Serie C)

  There’s a sense of safety, even invincibility, when you’re in a crowd. Everyone knows you’re with them, and they’re with you. You join up with a dozen, and then your dozen with dozens more. When there are two hundred of you, it’s intoxicating. It’s not just any crowd but your crowd, your crew. In the next two hours, nothing will come between you.

  The view of the mountain behind the far end of the stadium, its crags kissed by the setting sun, elevates the mood. An unlikely victory would give you the excuse for another song, another beer. But the actual spectacle of blokes chasing a ball about – that seems a bit ridiculous. Singing in unison, with the same purpose, is the source of the buzz and the euphoria. Your voices unite, your chest vibrates. All the shouting is suddenly harmonic. You’re making yourself heard at last but the words aren’t yours, the rhythm isn’t yours. You’ve become one with the group.

  The unity doesn’t come through words and music alone, but through actions too – the clapping and the jumping are tightly timed. It’s all about fitting in. You’re all facing one direction and you can see if the person in front claps their hands at the wrong moment, if someone isn’t bouncing in time. There are also looser codes of reaction to the game: agony and astonishment, outrage and ecstasy. Everyone holds their head when a shot flays the post. Yearning forearms stretch towards the ref when he gives a free kick to the other side. There’s no space for neutrality. A T-shirt says: ‘The strength of the pack is the wolf. The strength of the wolf is the pack.’

  It’s the first home game of the season. The previous match, at Monopoli, was a 3–1 disappointment. The Wolves had been 2–0 down within ten minutes and never looked like coming back. Now we’re at the San Vito Stadium, in the Curva Bergamini. There’s a passable portrait of Denis Bergamini, the Cosenza midfielder who was almost certainly murdered in 1989, on the back wall. Looming over the curva are two new high-rise buildings, both standing empty. ‘The usual corruption,’ sighs Boozy Suzy.

  Only two thousand fans are here, so large sections of the stadium are empty. About a hundred ultras form the hardcore of the curva. There’s no distinction between them and the ordinary fans, except for their noise and passion. Here, at least, it is raucous and contagious, the lyrics repetitive and basic. There’s a lot about love and beauty and heart. For tough nuts, the ultras’ songs are often pretty mawkish. If you think about the words, though, you miss the point. Like liturgies, they’re repetitive for a reason. There are so many oh-ings – predictable rising and falling cadences with ‘oh’ as the only lyric – and a song is repeated for so long, again and again, that soon anyone can join the bandit roar. The wooden lyricism enjoys a brusque tempo. One-Track, the bearded pizza maker, gives everything a fast and booming undercurrent on the drum.

  But nothing is spontaneous. If you burst into song of your own accord here, you will be shouted at and, somehow, persuaded to stop. Because on the railings, or ‘irons’, at the front are two or three men passing round a megaphone, their back to the pitch. These clerics lead the singing, furiously screaming at anyone who gives their throat a rest. The megaphone, covered with stickers from various groups, is in the hands of a hoarse and topless Elastic. ‘Put away your fucking phones,’ he screams angrily.

  Now he’s giving it full whack, and hundreds are linking arms and jumping as high as they dare, making the stadium vibrate a little underfoot: ‘Che bello è, quando esco di casa,’ people are smiling, catching each others’ eyes: ‘How beautiful it is when I get out of the house, to go to the stadium, to support Cosenza. Oh-oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh-oh.’

  Nowadays, many ultra groups dress almost identically. It reinforces the sense of the tribe, of belonging. Because of the drift to the far right, it’s common for ultras to wear black shirts and have shaved heads. But any uniform would be too orderly for the Cosentini. ‘All Colours are Beautiful’ says one banner in English, which is partly a nod to this terrace’s inclusivity but is really there because it makes the ACAB acronym (‘all cops are bastards’). As ever in the ultra underworld, a noble impulse is mixed up with name-calling. But there’s a sincerity about the wish for inclusion. Another banner, in the tribuna (the main stand), says ‘Refugees Welcome’.

  A few people have their eye on the game but many more are watching the spectacle of this terrace. This is the real theatre, the true festival. It’s like an open-air club, full of bleary-eyed partygoers in the afternoon sun. That game over there on the grass is decidedly incidental. And even if you wanted to, you would struggle to see the action through all the flags. Many fans are hugging friends, looking back at the faces above us, staring down at their palms as they’re skinning up. If you ask someone the name of a player, they look at you with annoyance – ‘eh?’ – like you had just asked them the time when they were in the midst of making love.

  But then a goal goes in. For Paganese. Then a minute later, another. There are groans and shouts and insults. ‘Our defence is as open as your mother’s legs,’ shouts Egg towards the manager.

  ‘This is shit,’ says Left-Behind. He’s on the fringes of the singing, leaning on the horizontal metal poles. ‘Shit, the only good thing that ever happened here,’ he says, ‘was the motorway to take us away.’

  That sense of fatalism informs all of the festivity, because despite the fun, shit-ness is an integral part of this way of life. Shitty bars, shitty buses, shitty stadiums, shitty games. Apart from those moments of euphoria, being an ultra is a grim existence. The re-enchantment of grimness is part of the alchemy of this world. But often the spell is broken and you wonder why you’re spending precious time and money on this crap. Many ask themselves: ‘Who forces me to do this?’

  But almost as if he can read the mood of his men, Elastic, with the megaphone, is heckling the crowd, screaming as if his voice alone could save a season. And suddenly everyone joins in the well-known song. ‘Come on Cosenza, take us away from this shitty division.’ It’s an old favourite, sung by almost every group in the lower leagues: ‘Forza Cosenza, portaci via, da questa merda di categoria.’ Suddenly, Left-Behind is brought to life, taken by the bouncing music and the vibrating concrete, and growls along. That song sums it up: the passion for the city but, at the same time, the longing that it might help you escape. Cosenza eventually lose the home game 0–2. No points after two games and, including a Coppa Italia disaster, a third defeat in a row.

  1940s, Cosenza

  There are two rivers in Cosenza. There’s a legend that if you dip your hair, your morals or
your silk in the Crati, they’ll lighten and go fair. But try the Busento, they say, and they’ll turn you and your cloth dark. The city grows at the confluence of these two rivers and their reputations. Their waters flow around the hilltop of the old city, Cosenza Vecchia, from whose summits and small squares you can glimpse the Silan mountains like sleeping rhinos on the horizon, black against the Ionian sunset.

  In the mid-1940s Francesco spent most of his days hunting for treasure in those two rivers with his friends. There was a legend that Alaric had been buried with his riches in one of the two rivers. To keep the location secret, all the slaves who had dug the tomb were killed and buried along with their master.

  The boys – Francesco and his friends – were only seven. They had shaved heads to keep them free of bugs. Hygiene was sometimes easier with scissors than with soaps. They knew the war was raging all around them. They had heard the bombs for months, first far off but now getting closer.

  Because they were smart, they didn’t look for treasure but for bones. They reckoned there would have been more slaves than gold, so the one would lead to the other. It added to the excitement too because every few metres by the edge of the water were chalky grey remains of birds and hares.

  When they got bored of looking for bones, the boys paddled in the river, pretending to catch sight of gold in the water. It was normally just white stones, though once Francesco had put some tin down there and fooled everyone. His father was a cake-maker and Francesco knew how to make dull things glisten.